Talk:Peter Anthony Newton

References and plagiarism
, I put some time into revising this draft under the assumption that anyone who'd taken the trouble to write about an [excuse me] somewhat obscure academic would be familiar with the conventions pertaining to plagiarism. Having done about all I could to the draft short of looking at its cited sources (let alone looking for other sources), I ... looked for the former sources.

Here they are, as they then were. (Their numbering is mine, for convenience on this talk page.)



The first and the third are identical. I've no complaints about this: merging the two was easy. The second is the contents page of a journal issue. One can see Newton's years of birth and death from the title of his obituary. The draft shows no sign that or any other contributor actually read the obituary, which should be easy to obtain if one has access to a British university library (I do not) or asks at the Resource Exchange. The fourth has a dead link. The simplicity of the URL suggests to me that it was mistaken from the outset. My guess is that this is supposed to mean "pages 108–116 of Mortimer Wheeler's book The British Academy 1949–1968, a copy of which the editor obtained at CVMA", but if this is right then I don't know why anyone would specify where the copy was found. (This isn't a rare book.) The last reference is to a library record.

"Newton & Newbold Collection - Library, The University of York" was the one I got to last. Much of what was sourced to it turned out instead to be quoted from it, without the necessary quotation marks. I find this depressing: I don't think that my classmates and I were particularly bright, but we absorbed the rules about plagiarism in the first week of our BA course. Is this stuff so hard? I also found it irritating: I'd put my time into mild rewording but now realized that I needed to revert most of my work in order to restore the quotation marks that honesty demands. -- Hoary (talk) 01:08, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Other sources
Newton's thesis is linked to from here. The links (or those of them that I tried) currently don't work. If they still don't work some time from now, somebody interested might tip off the webmaster of CVMA.

Newton is mentioned in this PDF file. What this is, is unexplained, but the page numbers are the same as for the Wheeler item mentioned above, and I imagine that this is a chunk of Wheeler's book. Its copyright status too is dubious. Well, it's another reason for an editor to hunt for a copy of the book, to look within that, and if this does indeed have material, to quote that.

"Newton & Newbold Collection - Library, The University of York" has a link to a Times obituary of Newton. The link won't work for most people, but the obituary is something to look for if you're in, or affiliated with, a well-heeled library. -- Hoary (talk) 01:43, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
 * , Many thanks on all of the above! Thanks for being so amazingly thorough. The volunteers who are putting these pages together are all first time wiki Eds, so still learning, so such detailed feedback is very useful. I had not noticed that the copy was mostly lifted, for instance, as it's not my job to check everything in detail (which is why contributors send through AfC. Thank you for taking the time to spot it! Finally, noted on more sources and better use of sources needed. For instance, the Journal of Stained Glass is only available as physical copies at our library (and other nearest libraries I can access), I can't go and check for now. Thanks for the Times obituary tip off also! KerstingFan (talk) 10:56, 10 December 2020 (UTC)